The simple act of acquiring non-traditional school chairs can serve as a first step in de-institutionalized thinking about schools.

As long as it is acceptable for chairs to be insignificant, garish and poorly constructed, then everyone’s imagination and appreciation is diminished.

One way out of our current catastrophe is to consider beautifully, lovingly constructed chairs. The adults change and the children change and it is all for the better inside an enhanced Circle of Children.

But for too many adults working in today’s USA classrooms, be they public or charter, these chairs would get you fired. Good luck finding an employee who attached significance to a chair, its artistry, composition or appeal to children.

But if you did locate such a humane individual, you would probably find them subject to the equivalent of a modern day witch hunt. Imagination and Initiative are lethal. Anything that lives outside the realm of metrics and data massaging must be extinguished. The cult of counters know how to look after their own and chair enthusiasts don’t belong.

It begins and ends with what Giroux calls “normalized ignorance”. The fog of crude, callow and empty gobbles up all available space. Chairs are ugly on purpose. No one cares about them and that’s exactly the point. In such schools, uncouth regimes remain as authoritarian sciolists. There is money to be made and beautiful chairs obstruct the cash flow.

A Bunny Chair will get you booted. You can bet on it.

And then there is the problem of going off message. Curriculum becomes a series of commercials on how to care for and preserve artful chairs.

Next, the Yoruba people arrive bringing with them a vibrant history of beading, braiding, tattooing, clay and ceramic molding, bronze casting, weaving, dyeing and sculpting.

When would there be time for War Room confabs, choking on bulging, black binders bursting with benchmark analytics?